Trump talked with Durbin on the phone that morning, all cheery about the prospects for a bipartisan deal on immigration; he invited Durbin and Lindsey Graham over for a meeting to do the deal.

But when they arrived at the Oval Office, the two senators were surprised to find that Trump was far from ready to finalize the agreement. He was “fired up” and surrounded by hard-line conservatives such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), who seemed confident that the president was now aligned with them, according to one person with knowledge of the meeting.

Trump told the group he wasn’t interested in the terms of the bipartisan deal that Durbin and Graham had been putting together. And as he shrugged off suggestions from Durbin and others, the president called nations from Africa “shithole countries,” denigrated Haiti and grew angry. The meeting was short, tense and often dominated by loud cross-talk and swearing, according to Republicans and Democrats familiar with the meeting.

Trump’s ping-ponging from dealmaking to feuding, from elation to fury, has come to define the contentious immigration talks between the White House and Congress, perplexing members of both parties as they navigate the president’s vulgarities, his combativeness and his willingness to suddenly change his position.

He’s what the professionals call labile. That’s the opposite of being a stable genius.

Trump complained that there wasn’t enough money included in the deal for his promised wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. He also objected that Democratic proposals to adjust the visa lottery and federal policy for immigrants with temporary protected status were going to drive more people from countries he deemed undesirable into the United States instead of attracting immigrants from places like Norway and Asia, people familiar with the meeting said.

Norway & Asia – a country of a few million & a region of several billion.

But more to the point we can see what he’s doing here – he’s wanting to shape the demographics of the US. I can think of someone else who wanted to shape the demographics of a large region in that way.

Attendees who were alarmed by the racial undertones of Trump’s remarks were further disturbed when the topic of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) came up, these people said.

At one point, Durbin told the president that members of that caucus — an influential House group — would be more likely to agree to a deal if certain countries were included in the proposed protections, according to people familiar with the meeting.

Trump was curt and dismissive, saying he was not making immigration policy to cater to the CBC and did not particularly care about that bloc’s demands, according to people briefed on the meeting. “You’ve got to be joking,” one adviser said, describing Trump’s reaction.

White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly was in the room and was largely stone-faced, not giving any visible reaction when Trump said “shithole countries” or when he said Haitians should not be part of any deal, White House advisers said.

At one point, Graham told Trump he should use different language to discuss immigration, people briefed on the meeting said.

It’s unpleasantly easy to picture, isn’t it.

Trump had seemed for several days to be favoring a deal that Democrats could sign up to.

But some White House officials, including conservative adviser Stephen Miller, feared that Graham and Durbin would try to trick Trump into signing a bill that was damaging to him and would hurt him with his political base.

His base. His fucking base. His fucking base that is happy with his racist abuse. We mustn’t do what’s better for human beings and the country, we must do what makes Trump’s loathsome base happy.

So the Miller faction called the more racist senators and told them to come on over for the meeting.

“Once we saw what was going on in the meeting a few days earlier, we were freaked out,” said immigration hard-liner Mark Krikorian, who runs the Center for Immigration Studies. Trump, he said, “has hawkish instincts on immigration, but they aren’t well-developed, and he hasn’t ever been through these kind of legislative fights.”

After the Thursday meeting, Trump began telling allies that the proposal was a “terrible deal for me,” according to a friend he spoke with, and that Kelly and other aides and confidants were correct in advising him to back away.

The deal wasn’t racist enough. The base wouldn’t like it. The base wants more racism.

Trump was not particularly upset by the coverage of the meeting and his vulgarity after it was first reported by The Washington Post, calling friends and asking how they expected it to play with his political supporters, aides said.

“Everyone was saying it would help with the base,” which would agree with his characterization, one person who spoke with the president said.

2 Responses to “You can never be racist enough for the base”

His base – a minority of the American public who somehow managed to get themselves in control of the White House, much of the Congress, and now probably the courts, against the desires, needs, and preferences of the majority of the (supposedly democratic) country. Why?

Because the rest of the country is nice enough to not want to say what these people really are, and to penalize a presidential candidate for daring to say it – “a basket of deplorables”.

Besides, too many of that majority found themselves unable to back the other candidate, who was as different from Trump as night is from day, and believed that said other candidate was actually just Trump-lite, or worse, was more corrupt than Trump and all his Trumplings put together. This in spite of all the facts, all the evidence, all the logic…and the fact that she is probably one of the most investigated women in the entire world, so we should have some clue by now. Sometimes I feel that people (in my own circle, too, unfortunately – mostly unchosen circle that I was thrust into) are going after her harder than Ness went after Capone. Hope she’s paid her taxes….